Newer grbl compatibility?

Is the nomad compatible with newer grbl than 0.9g? There have been a few releases with good features since then.

–chris

I’ve seen a couple posts where they have said they will be issuing a “compatible version” sometime, but haven’t heard anything more definitive. There are quite a few new things in there that will be nice - including a much better “pause” mode for getting the spindle out of the way.

I’ve been watching GRBL development, and it’s been pretty slow recently, not sure what other stuff Rob and crew are waiting for.

Grbl’s slow development is totally my fault. It’s been a comedy of “interesting” life events for the past couple of years, so bear with me. In terms of development, the main issue is actually getting everything to fit into the 328p. I’ve had to refactor large portions of the code to get overrides installed. At this point, Grbl v1.0 only needs a few minor things worked out before release. If it wasn’t for a home burglary (one of these many life events), I probably would have had it out last month, but with my luck recently, these things seem to always come up.

With the hold and park motion, this is also a limitation of how much flash space is available for this feature. It can be enabled in the edge branch version, but it takes up quite a bit of flash. Flash that is mainly reserved for overrides. At this point, it’ll be a very tight fit to get both overrides and parking enabled on the 328p. It’s basically one or the other.

2 Likes

Having spent years doing commercial development for even smaller micros (68HC05, 128bytes of ram, 2k of rom for the smallest part, 8k for the biggest - try fitting a whole cordless phone handset in 2k…) I know where you’re coming from. I’m pretty impressed with how much you -have- been able to fit in the 328p using C. I certainly appreciate your efforts.

Just out of curiosity, is there a reason not to enable targeting a much larger part (like the 2560?)

It’s due to ubiquity of the Arduino Uno and the ease of which anyone can flash Grbl onto one to try out CNCing. It’s also partly due to supporting existing hardware, like Carbide3d’s, and making sure the 328p version of Grbl has the minimum feature set for CNC. Once v1.0 with its overrides comes out, that pretty much completes Grbl IMHO and it’ll be in maintenance mode in terms of development.

That said, I do hear you about targeting much more capable MCUs. Don’t worry, I’m on it and it’ll be much more than a simple port of Grbl to something like an ARM (which won’t do much other than being faster). The new project is fundamentally different and better in just about every way.

1 Like

Looking forward to seeing what’s next!